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This level of photography doesn’t come cheap. My package cost almost $16,000 with $10,000 going to the photography and prop styling, $3,000 to the food styling, nearly $1,000 for the groceries, and the rest going to HST.

No trickery, I told the team. No shaving cream standing in for whipped cream. No mashed potatoes made of shortening. Everything had to be edible after we finished shooting. I’m proud to report that we lunched on much of the food, though Szulc and Johari are vegetarian and we ordered in as well.

Witenoff divided up the 32 recipes so we would tackle four to six dishes a day. (We shot a handful of “vignettes,” or ingredient shots, each day as well.) He grocery shopped and brought all his cooking gear to the studio.

“We want everything to be very accurate and taste right and give the right impression to the reader,” Witenoff explains. “So the recipes are done fully and accurately and then they’re enhanced with little touches, more for visual effect.”

Little touches include things like using red and green peppers to garnish my crumpet French toast (instead of just one colour), or adding extra freshly ground black pepper on the yolks of Pita Break’s Poached Eggs in Spicy Tomato Stew.

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Witenoff has a toolbox and tool belt for his treasured culinary gear.

There are scissors to trim food like noodles, tweezers to carefully place ingredients, a paint brush to remove dust, an offset spatula to create swirls, and syringes to apply sauce.

“My kit is a mix of medical supplies, art supplies, kitchen supplies and also things from the hardware store like blow torches, steamers and barbecue knives,” Witenoff reveals.

He will “do fake ice cream when it’s permitted,” but usually relies on an arsenal of tricks to make food look fabulous. He might blanch a vegetable instead of fully sautéeing it, to keep the colour sharp. The only big “trick” he used for my book was to use dry ice to keep Augie’s Watermelon Lemonade Ice Pops looking frosty. (You can see the ice in the photo.)

“The main thing is trying to keep everything looking fresh if it has to sit for an hour,” Witenoff explains.

Once the food is ready, it’s Johari’s turn.

She filled a vast table at the edge of the studio with plateware, bowls, dishes, cutlery, linens, backgrounds and more.

“I like using cool grays and so does Ryan. It’s a nice palette for food.”

Most of the props were from Johari’s vast collection. She rented three surfaces at $100 a pop for the week, including a large piece of slate.

I brought two beloved props of my own—the carbon steel wok that the Sichuan Peppercorn Cashew Chicken was cooked and photographed in, and the five pieces of flattened silverware used in the vignette shot that launches the salad chapter. (The cutlery is actually from wind chimes that I bought from a blacksmith in Alberta.)

When Johari and Witenoff are happy with the way a dish looks, it’s Szulc’s turn.

Working with a “very high resolution” medium-format digital camera on a studio stand, Szulc sets up a “shooting table” with two sawhorses and whatever surface Johari has chosen.

He “gets a quick read” of the dish, and then perfects the shot with things like different angles, crops and lighting.

“It is truly a team thing with the food stylist, prop stylist, your input and the photographer,” Szulc stresses. “I like to work with people that I am at ease with and that trust each other. It’s not great if people are not communicating.”

Our shoot goes off without a hitch, fight or tantrum.

When Szulc is done, Gibson starts on retouching. He obliterates tiny, often imperceptible, dust spots, something he describes as “really calming, almost zen-like. I sit there and let the stuff come to me.”

For our shoot, Gibson also made a short stop-motion video of the work that went into photographing one dish — Bibimbap (a Korean rice bowl).

At the end of the shoot we gathered around Szulc’s computer and admired the photos. We talked about which pictures were our favourites and least favourites.

We all adored the shot of Porchetta & Co.’s Rapini and Garlic Chili. The gorgeous green vegetable sits in a pie plate (an untraditional touch thanks to Johari), and has red chili flakes scattered outside the dish in the bottom left corner of the photo (that’s Witenoff’s work). The backdrop and linens are that gray that Johari and Szulc both love.

We hoped rapini would become the book’s cover shot. It’s made it onto the cover as one of four dishes. When you have so many fabulous photos to choose from, it’s no surprise that the designers picked four for the cover instead of just one.

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